One thing to keep in mind about FAF in general is that large numbers of any unit perform horribly due to the pathfinding issues we have in game. The more shards we add into the navy the worse the navy as a whole will perform.

Frigates are a prime example of this, you can get 40 frigates for the price of one Summit or 30 for the price of one Neptune. It's a choice in favour of the frigates in most cases.

But 160 frigates vs 4 Summits and 120 frigates vs 3 Neptunes is a choice where almost always you will want the Summits or the Neptunes simply because you need to do 16 commands to get the frigates moving, while 1 command will work for the Summits and the Neptunes.

So if the increased micro for the torping side is an issue, the same can be said for the naval side. In this case I think the issue is worse for the naval side because of FAF pathfinding lag, while split attack is a fairly simple and robust procedure. If we do need to force more micro for one side, I'd rather it be on the torping side.

Preferable to both would be an increase in effectiveness vs planes though. This ofc is harder to achieve without ruining gunship vs shard balance but I think it's worth it to try out higher damage values. It is 80% of the cost of a T1 AA with 50% dps and 400% buildtime after all.

I'm not sure but it actually looks like you have omitted one single flaw and that is, for each 2 shards you get roughly one more frigate on the other side of the barricade. Let's say you have 5k mass in navy, one side is aeon and is doing a mix of units 5 to 1 while second is full on Thunderhead spam. This way you get 16 aeon frigates and 3 shards vs 18 uef frigates. The AA of Aeon ammounts to 105dps and 2100hp while the dps of UEF navy is 180 and 38160hp.Now just get rid of 2 uef frigates and switch them to 2 torps and you get rid of all aeon AA in 1.5 pass after wchich the aeon is totally defensless. And if we actually switch to sera or cybran the numbers are even worse with cybran sporting 320 dps and sera 240 dps. The 1hp buff might certainly be brutal but it may be accompanied by slight mass cost inrease or simply we can try tweaking the dps/range on shard to make it more cost efficient than it is now.

Aeon isn't a faction where you can just make a single multipurpose unit like you can with Sera or Cybran. You need to combine navy, some hover (shields at T2), and air, which is the best at T2. They also have many other things to compensate for their bad T1 navy

Shard should be the early t1 - early t2 unit. It doesn't actually matter if Shard is OP against torp bombers or not because at some point it becomes obselite by t2 hover flak which is immortal to torp bombers and OP against gunships and pretty much everything that is slower than Strat.

Here's graph based on DPS/mass numbers and total mass investments assuming you have to build single t1 naval facotry or land fac+t2 HQ to build units.

graph.png (25.81 KiB) Viewed 882 times

Flak will always win Shard. My concept lets you build Shard in early game and stay efficient compare to t2 flak much longer than both current and "Gala" concept.

VictimOfJaggedBalance wrote:IMO Scathis is in a perfect spot right now - nobody's using it, so nobody's complaining about it, just like fire beetles.

Seems like people still dont care so more data to work with....Aeon frigate - hp/mass - 6,39 DPs/mass- 0,206 range 32 To use full dps it have to turn it's hull into a broadside position and turn it's rear turret.Cybran- hp/mass - 7,6 DPs/mass- 0,2572 range 28 Starts using it's full dps from the get go as it have front mounted gun.Uef- hp/mass - 7,56 DPs/mass- 0,179 range 28 SameSera- hp/mass - 7,408 DPs/mass- 0,204 range 28 have to turn it's gun